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Is Lidia Thorpe the dumbest parliamentarian this side of the Tasman? We know she’s got some pretty stiff competition on your side of the ditch. In case you’re lucky enough to not know who she is, imagine Debbie Pākehā, or whatever her name is, only with lower standards and less penchant for dressing like a bargain-basement steampunk cosplay.
Thorpe’s resume to date has included ex-bikie moll, getting thrown out of a Pride parade, crawling on her hands and knees in the mud outside Parliament House and screaming racist abuse at a strip club… And now, screeching at the King like a drunken slag picking a cat fight on K Road in the early hours of a Saturday morning.
Her dimwitted response to charges that she violated her oath of allegiance makes Mayella Ewell sound calm and reasoned.
Independent senator Lidia Thorpe has offered an extraordinary defence of whether she breached her parliamentary oath, claiming she pledged allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s “hairs” rather than her “heirs” when she was sworn into parliament...On Wednesday, the Indigenous senator was asked by the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing if she had renounced her sworn parliamentary affirmation to bear true allegiance to the monarch in her heckling of the king.
“I swore allegiance to the queen’s hairs,” she replied.
Even the most mentally challenged dullard, though, is capable of some fast thinking when their income is threatened. Thorpe’s apparent admission that she hadn’t properly taken the oath required of a parliamentarian immediately raised eyebrows – and the prospect of a legal challenge to her legitimacy.
Cue frantic backpedalling.
Lidia Thorpe has walked back her account of the affirmation she gave when sworn in as a senator, saying her pronunciation of “the Queen’s heirs” as “the Queen’s hairs” was an accident.
Accident? Or lack of education?
But in a Sky News interview on Thursday, Senator Thorpe said she “spoke what [she] read on the card,” on which “heirs” was written.
Perhaps she should axe her setchetary how to pronunciate gooder ’n’ stuff.
The remarks prompted a flurry of criticism from Senate colleagues and also set off speculation about the legality of her office, with the Coalition canvassing “legal opinions” […]
Earlier on Thursday, Labor’s manager of Senate business Katy Gallagher suggested she was open to considering a censure or other disciplinary action after Senator Thorpe interrupted Monday’s royal reception, but has yet to discuss this with the opposition.
Don’t forget that the Senate recently took it on itself to pass a censure motion on Bettina Arndt, a private citizen who was totally unable to defend herself. Yet, it continually tolerates not just Thorpe’s bogan antics, but the outright anti-Semitism of the Greens and Fatima Payman.
The coalition isn’t waiting for the Senate to drag its heels.
The Coalition escalated its criticism of Senator Thorpe on Wednesday after she made light of her oath. Simon Birmingham, the Coalition’s Senate leader, said that was “a deeply serious claim to be making that does bring her eligibility to participate in the proceedings of the Senate into question.”
He said the Coalition was considering “legal opinions” about the validity of the affirmation, which is a constitutional requirement.
Senate President Sue Lines accepted the affirmation as valid at the time despite the mispronunciation but may have scope to review that judgement.
Senator Birmingham also compared Thorpe’s oath comments to Sinn Féin members in the UK who refused to take an oath of affirmation of loyalty to the British Monarch.
“As a consequence of that, for many years those elected Members of the House of Commons in the UK have on principle never actually taken up those seats in the House of Commons.
“Lidia Thorpe is not showing that type of principle. She wants to try to have it both ways.”
In everything. Thorpe claims not to ‘assimilate to the colonial structures’: except, y’know, her parliamentary salary, perks, expenses… not to mention scarfing up the colonialist goodies in the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.
But then, she also claims, against all obvious evidence, to be “black”.
